Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known by his pseudonym Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri on 30 November 1835, during the passing of Halley’s Comet. Four years later, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a river port on the banks of the Mississippi. There, watching the steamboats come and go, Samuel’s ambition was to become a river pilot: literary fame was a few careers into the future.
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Apprenticed to a printer, Clemens’ first job was typesetting, but eventually he fulfilled his dream and became a Mississippi steamboat pilot. With the start of the Civil War in 1861, river traffic came to a halt and Clemens, after a brief, failed attempt at mining, tuned to journalism, writing under the pen name Mark Twain (a leadsman’s call for a measure of two fathoms’ depth, from his riverboat days).
Success came in 1865 when his story ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’ was published in a New York paper and followed by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. Recognized as a gifted humourist, Twain was commissioned to travel to the Mediterranean with a party of American tourists; the resulting book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), was another triumph.
Twain became a celebrity on the ‘Lyceum circuit’, giving popular lectures around the country; his improved prospects enabled him to marry Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon and, after another stint of journalism in Buffalo, to settle in Hartford, Connecticut and raise three daughters. Livy’s family were from Elmira, New York, and it was there, during summer vacations at her sister’s property, that Twain wrote his masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Despite his great success as a writer, in later life Twain engaged in ill-advised business enterprises. Financial anxieties, gruelling lecture tours to make money and, above all, the deaths of his beloved Livy and two of his daughters marred his final years. He died of a heart attack just a few weeks before Halley’s Comet returned in 1910.
